"One Woman’s War (Da)" is many things. Part autobiography, part oral history of the Iran-Iraq War (1980–88), the work is the story of Zahra Hoseyni, a female descendant of the Prophet Mohammad (thereby termed a seyyedeh), whose Kurdish family found refuge in Iran after being expelled from their native Iraq. There are three parts to the book. The first speaks of the author’s early life—her childhood in Iraq, her family’s emigration to Iran, and their struggles adapting to life in Khorramshahr, a port city on the Persian Gulf. The second and largest part deals with Zahra Hoseyni’s experiences during the first three weeks of the Iran-Iraq War (September 22–October 13, 1980), including her activities as a collector of body parts and washer of corpses, her role as a nurse to wounded civilians and soldiers, and her activities as a combatant in the defense of Khorramshahr. The final part of the book is devoted to Zahra Hoseyni’s recovery from shrapnel wounds received on the battlefield and to her married life, spent in two homes: one in a suburban area of southwestern Iran within commuting distance of the front and the second in an urban apartment house in central Tehran.

"One Woman’s War" is the product of more than a thousand hours of Zahra Hoseyni’s interviews with A’zam Hoseyni (a woman with the same family name but no relation to the narrator). The book was part of a larger project to record the oral histories of Iranian women who took part in the Iran-Iraq War. Having outsold or gone through more reprints than all other Iran-Iraq War memoirs by a factor of a hundred, the Zahra Hoseyni-A’zam Hoseyni collaboration has been and continues to be a cultural phenomenon in the Islamic Republic. What might be termed the institutionalization of Da began less than a year after it first appeared in September 2008. Early in the spring of 2009, Seyyed Mohammad Reza Mirtajeddini, a Principalist member of Iran’s legislature from Tabriz and Vice-President for Parliamentary Affairs under President Ahmadinezhad, proposed ways to publicize and disseminate Da at a meeting honoring its creators and publisher. With the New Year imminent, he suggested the book be presented to deputies so they could read it over the two-week holiday recess. Mirtajeddini further proposed the memoir be awarded to deserving students in schools, universities, and cultural centers.

"One Woman’s War" was a hit with more than just hard-line politicians. The reformist Mohammad Ali Abtahi, a former Vice President of Iran and close associate of Mohammad Khatami (President 1997–2005), recalls that his wife brought the book home, but he was too busy with the 2008 presidential elections to read it. Abtahi eventually found ample opportunity to do so after going to prison in June 2009. Many readers see Da as an epic of grief and suffering that evokes the formative event in Shiism: the martyrdom in 680 of Imam Hoseyn, his family, and a small band of followers at Karbala. To the documentary filmmaker Mohammad Mehdi Khaleqi, Zahra Hoseyni’s accounts of the martyrdom of her father and brother are so remarkable that they take the place of the most moving eulogies commemorating the suffering at Karbala. In this reading, the Zahra Hoseyni–A’zam Hoseyni collaboration functions like the traditional dirges or passion pageants (ta’ziyeh) performed during the month of Moharram. Da, in effect, brings the archetypal Shii narrative of martyrdom from the seventh century into the twentieth and thereby contemporizes the slaughter at Karbala in the context of the Iran-Iraq War.